Your Right to Know

LOS ANGELES — Hillary Clinton said yesterday that she was merely comparing the tactics used by
Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin — not equating the men themselves — when she drew a parallel
between Hitler’s efforts to resettle Germans in the late 1930s to Putin’s recent moves to issue
Russian passports to citizens in Ukraine with ties to Russia.

The eyebrow-raising remarks were offered at a private fundraiser in Long Beach, Calif., on
Tuesday.

“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s,” Clinton said, according to
the
Long Beach Press Telegram. “The Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia
and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying, ‘They’re not being treated right. I must go and
protect my people’ — and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

In an address at the University of California-Los Angeles yesterday, Clinton reiterated that she
was not putting Putin in the category of Hitler. Rather, she said, she was just noting that claims
by Putin and other Russian leaders that they needed to go into Crimea to protect Russian minorities
were “reminiscent of claims that were made back in the 1930s when Germany under the Nazis kept
talking about how they had to protect German minorities” in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

“So I just want everybody to have a little bit more perspective,” Clinton said. “I’m not making
a comparison certainly, but I am recommending that we can perhaps learn from this tactic that has
been used before.”

The former secretary of state and potential 2016 presidential candidate praised the Obama
administration’s use of diplomacy in the Ukraine crisis during her UCLA remarks, and she echoed
President Barack Obama’s statement that Russia’s intervention in Crimea was a violation of
international law.

“I support the administration’s call for Russia to respect its obligations and to refrain from
the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine,”
she said.

Of Putin, Clinton said: “I know we are dealing with a tough guy with a thin skin. I’ve had a lot
of experience — well, not only with him but with people like that.”

Putin wants to “re-Sovietize” nations on Russia’s periphery, she said, and “in the process, he
is squandering the potential of such a great nation — the nation of Russia — and threatening the
instability and even the peace of Europe.”

Republicans are questioning her toughness with Russian leaders during her tenure at the State
Department.